Then LORAs were conceptualized, designed, and implemented by scientific researchers completely unrelated to the community (brought to fine tune LLMs, adapted to work with diffusion), which almost instantly displaced most of those techniques. If you ever wasted any amount of time learning those methods, your knowledge is actively tainted by outdated tidbits that need to be unlearned. Foundational changes of this nature happened frequently.
Many similar stories will go untold, im sure.
The same could be said of prompt engineering. Gone are the days of telling the model that it is an expert software engineer with a PhD in the most relevant subtopic. These days the common wisdom is to just clearly articulate what you want it to do. Huge amounts of energy put into prompt engineering are now completely swept away by incremental model advances.
Yep. I'm watching 5 month old youtube videos about all these MCP servers you can add to Claude Code and subsequently how to manage the context window bloat, and I'm like ".... all these problems they're describing are solved out of the box?"
and that's when I realize its 5 months old and therefore not using Opus 4.5